Joi F

It sucks to have a 7 hour time difference .. it means that the autonotify e-mails are usually sent after I go home in the afternoon and don’t see them until the next day. For a hot product like this one, I’ll probably miss it. I think I’ll backorder this time! :-)
http://i.imgur.com/kym4K.jpg

It’s really nice to see how much attention the RPi is getting. I wonder if it owes some of its attention to the SparkMakerDuino community? Although it has a REALLY nice price-tag, I’m not convinced it’s only because of that; people are generally happy spending a bit of money on what they’re passionate about.

Back in 2004-2005 I started using the Stargate board ( http://platformx.sourceforge.net/ - Datasheet: http://platformx.sourceforge.net/Documents/manuals/6020-0049-02_A_Stargate.pdf ), which was a 400MHz ARM (Intel XScale) platform. I absolutely loved the Stargate and I still have one lying around. It had some/most of the same I/O capabilities as the RPi, excluding the audio and video stuff (which is not that useful for most robotics projects, anyway. Also, it’d be interesting to know how much of the RPi’s power-consumption is spent on the graphics and audio processing, even when a display is not connected) but it had a nifty serial-terminal instead. It retailed at $695.

This product died about two years later, because at the time there didn’t seem to be much interest in a board like that .. while now, the RPi is knocking people’s socks off!
The times they are a-changin'!

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